Having any sort of comment functionality on your blog means you’re going to get spam at some point or another. Even a little site like mine with virtually no traffic compared to a lot of other blogs out there can get plenty.

As this is a WordPress based site I’ve got the Askimet plugin running on it by default, and it does catch it’s fair share of rubbish comments, but I was still getting a good 10 or more spam comments in my comment queue to moderate every day. Again, not a lot, but enough to get on your wick after a while – especially seen as 99% of them were just big, long lists of spammy links. In the WordPress admin you can already set up a filter to say… “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 5 or more links. (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.)”… but that still meant I had to manually delete all those dud comments.

So, after a bit of googling I found an awesome little plugin called Simple Spam Filter for WordPress (download it here). This little wonder, like WordPress, can be set up to “Block comments with 15 or more links to external sites “ – but by block it mean delete/kill/exterminate – i.e. it the crappy comment never even appears in your spam queue and it’s automatically squashed.

I personally think this is a feature that should be added to WordPress by deafult, but until that day, TanTan’s plugin will do just fine.

So if anyone’s genuinely trying to post a comment on my blog with more than 15 url’s

in it – sorry, but I can’t hear you, you’ll have to try shouting a little louder. But, I’m pretty confident any comment with that many links if guaranteed to be one of the bad guys, and TanTan’s plugin dealing with it so I don’t have to can only be a good thing.

Most of the stuff pre-Christmas was all to do with Campfire (which I’ve yet to sort out a load of screen grabs for) but I also got the chance to do some nicely textured and illustrated headers for the latest phase of development their website’s going through…

You can take a look at each one in more detail here…

…and so far I’ve been very impressed, as have the people on the other end of my invoices. But that’s a whole other post I need to write. This one’s just a little one to big-up the boys and girls who work at FreshBooks who listen to what their customers want and act on it – a rare thing indeed.

I was one of the many folks who asked for Google Checkout (the search giant’s answer to the seemingly ubiquitous PayPal) to be supported as an online payment option for the invoices I send via FreshBooks – and the powers that be made it happen.

There were already plenty of other options in there – big names like authorize.net and PayPal etc – but they take a much much larger commission per transaction than Google do, were therefore much less attractive and I never bothered looking into them. Google Checkout still takes a cut, but it’s tiny in comparison and I’m more than happy to sacrifice a few quid in exchange for the convenience of not having to cash as many cheques.

Stripped down it’s just a really simple form, but they wanted a nice front end to it that matched their previous Be Part of It campaign that they’d designed in-house – big bold graphics and colours seemed to be the order of the day. They suggested a slider for the ‘good > bad’ rating and it turned out pretty neat and tidy.

I made the slider work with a bit of Scriptaculous magic instead of jQuery which is what I’d have ordinarily used – but they use Prototype in-house so it made sense to stick with their clever developer folk are used to.

What is Picasa Photo Viewer? Well, like it says on the screen shot down below it’s a fast, powerful image viewer for viewing image and photos directly from Windows Explorer*

* I’m not sure about OSX, but Picasa 3 is now available for the Mac so chances are it’s part of the OSX version too – someone let me know will ya?)

It comes as part of the new and improved
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Picasa 3 which was recently released, and since I discovered it it’s become my default image viewer – which for a graphics designer a reasonably important thing to have in the tool kit.

Up until now I’ve just been happy with looking at images in Windows Explorer, but it’s slow and clunky and doesn’t support the majority of file types I work with on a daily bases – namely Photoshop PSD files and TGA’s etc. I could use Adobe Bridge to view those files, and I sometimes do, but in 99% of situations Bridge is overkill if all I’m wanting to do is scroll through a few images and try find the right file I’m
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working on. I’ve used a few other apps in the past, but they’ve always been way over-complicated for just looking through a few PSD files.

So far Picasa Photo Viewer seems like the perfect alternative for viewing image files in Explorer. It’s fast, doesn’t struggle with big layered PSD files or large images and shows everything in a tidy LightBox style overlay above everything else on your desktop…
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Plus, if you’ve got a Google Account and have Picasa Web Albums set up, you can easily upload an image to your account with the click of a button. By default they get put in a “Drop Box” album, but you can sort them out and organise them online however you like.

All in all it’s a great little free tool that comes as part of the equally fantastic Picasa. If you’re fed up with Windows Explorer’s very limited image viewing options it can’t hurt to give it a try, can it?
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This plugin is now hosted in the Plugin Directory at WordPress.org

I’ll keep this page up-to-date regarding updates on it etc, but click the link below to go download it…

• WP-Admin-Quicklinks v1.01

What does it do?

WP Admin Quicklinks is a very simple little WordPress plugin (just install it and it should work – no options to configure) that adds an intelligent, unobtrusive little admin panel to the top-right of all your site’s pages and posts (only once you’ve logged in), giving you shortcuts to the most commonly used WP Admin sections – well, the ones I was always needing to link to anyway.

Currently they are…

• Edit this Post/Page (only shows if you’re on a single post or a page)
• Add new Post
• Dashboard
• Posts
• Pages
• Plugins
• Log out

Do I need it? Aren’t there lots of plugins that do this already?

Yes, there are lots of similar plugins, and as great as most of the ones I tried are,  I found non of them were quite right for me. The two best ones I found were…

• WordPress Admin Bar
• WP Easy Admin

They’re both well made, highly customisable plugins that did the job but they have one thing in common which I personally didn’t like – they both add a big thick admin bar across the top of each page, pushing your own layout down. This was no good for me as I didn’t like the look of a big fat bar on the top of the pages I was working on – it made it harder to visualise how the page would actually look to an end user. It comes down to personal preference.

Functionality wise they are better than my little plugin in that they give direct access to pretty much all the admin pages, but I prefer mine in terms of it’s simplicity and I like the fact that it doesn’t spoil the look and feel or significantly alter the layout of the blog/site I’m working on.

Screenshots

This one shows the WP-Admin-Quicklinks plugin at the top-right of page, installed and running on my site. It shows faded like this until you move the mouse over it.

The admin panel comes into full view as soon as you mouse over it…

If you’re on a Single post or page, the extra shortcut ‘Edit this post/page’ appears…

Same again, just showing it in-situ on a different site, illustrating it just fading away into the background until you need it, not really spoiling the visual layout as you develop and build your site.

Installation

• Download the plugin, unzip it and upload it to your plugins directory – /wp-content/plugins/
• Activate it from the ‘Plugins’ are of the WordPress admin
• That’s it, you’re done

Not working?

This plugin should work with most themes out there. If it doesn’t it’s probably because the theme you’re using doesn’t have the correct template tags in it. WP Admin Quicklinks requires that both the <?php wp_head(); ?> and <?php wp_footer(); ?> template tags are in the theme, usually in the header.php and footer.php respectively. If they’re not there you can try add them yourself, or try contact the theme’s author and ask if they’d be nice enough to update the theme and add them for you.

Changelog

• v1.01 (08/01/2009) – Fix WP2.7 ‘Logout’ link redirect for on the homepage, category and archive pages etc
• v1.00 (07/01/2009) – Initial release

Notes

• I’m no PHP developer, so if there’s a better way of going about this please let me know :)
• Tested and working in WordPress 2.7. It should work in 2.6, maybe even 2.5, but I’ve not tried it. Let me know if there’s any issues.
• In WordPress 2.7 and above it makes use of the new  wp_logout_url template tag and redirects you directly back to the page you logged-out from.
• In WordPress versions < 2.7 it (in theory) adds a a standard wp_loginout().

Background

This is my first plugin for WordPress (so be gentle), and came about because I’ve ended up using WordPress to build a few CMS sites for people recently. I needed a nice easy way to jump to various sections and pages of the admin from front-end pages I was testing etc.

It started off as a bit of code I put in the footer of all the templates I make, and all it does is add a discreet floating admin panel to the top right of each page of your WordPress based site. To make it easier to add it to future sites I looked at a few of the plugins I had installed, saw how to make them write code into the footer automatically, and put this little thing together.

You like it? You like it a lot?

Now, this is entirely up to you, but I’m not going to be unhappy if you click the nice little PayPal button below

Chances are you’re also probably getting a little bored of it too, and who doesn’t like a little choice these days anyway.

The Original

• http://www.lipsum.com/

As far as I know this is the original Lorem Ipsum generator – at least it’s the only one I’ve ever used in the past. Genuine Lorem’s great in that it simulates ‘real’ text content with a readable combination of long and short words that are inoffensive and can be used in just about any old place.

I’m not promising the list of alternatives below are all suitable for use in your work – that ultimately depends on the sense of humor of your client. So if you’re doing something for a big corporate gig, probably best sticking to good old Lipsum.

The Alternatives

These aren’t in any particular order, so just dig in and see if there’s any you like…

• Malevole’s text generator
  Paragraphs of text from TV show intro’s or theme tunes etc. If you’re younger than 20, you might want to skip this one
• BlindTextGenerator
  Lots of options and variations to play with
• Corporate Ipsum
  A widget for OSX generating some cliched, buzz-word filled business jabber
• sfco.uld.be
  As far as I can tell it’s text generated by the Corporate Ipsum widget above, but for the benefit of us people without a Mac -you can just copy and paste.
• Leon’s random essay generator
  Not strictly for this purpose, but it seems some folk do use it to create their dummy text
• adhesiontext™
  Lots of options and different langauges/character stes to play with
• Generator3
  Yes it has Lipsum in there but there’s plenty options to play with for other languages etc.
• HintPlus
  Very Lipsummy style output, but with much less old Latin style words.
• Gangsta Lorem ippzle
  If you’re a fan od words beginning with, including and ending with ‘izzle‘, this one’s for you.

Lipsum with a twist

Below are some tools that still generate the Lipsum we know and love/hate, but have their own take on the output or the way it’s generated.

• HTML Ipsum
  Lipsum ready to copy and paste, but pre-formatted with various HTML tags
• Lorem2
  Some dummy text just waiting for you to copy and paste. Basically Lipsum.com without the need to click the ‘generate’ button

If you know of any others that are work a mention just let me know!

1. They do a lot of excellent work and the projects I’ve worked on in the past with them have always been genuinely interesting and challenging.
2. My second baby is due to be born around mid April, so having guaranteed work up until the day that he/she pops his/her head out into this wonderful world means I can have a good month off afterwards and make the most of the being a new Dad for the second time.

Had the offer been from someone else or I hadn’t been in the same situation I probably would have said “Thanks, but not thanks”.

“But why?” I hear you ask – surely in these times it’d be daft to turn down guaranteed work? Yes, it probably would, but if I was that bothered about guaranteed work or not willing to take some risks I wouldn’t have gone freelance at all.

Going freelance in the first place for me was…

i) all about getting to spend much more time with my growing family (My little girl had just been born and if I’d still been working in my old place I wouldn’t get to see her half as much as I do now, and that would be a terrible, terrible thing, because there’s nothing more important than spending time my girl)

ii) to work on lots of different jobs for different people

iii)and not having to do do amends to the same old sites I’d been looking at and working on for the couple of years prior. Yeah, the job security was comforting and people I worked with were ace, but the projects were no longer inspiring me and I wanted new challenges. My wife likes it too, the fact I work at home more. And I’m pretty sure the dog’s happy about it too.

All in all I think I’m safe in taking on a 3 month contract – there shouldn’t be too many cobwebs settling while I’m there and it’ll be nice to be part of a studio for a while again. But then come B-Day II, I can shed the shackles of the office once again, safe in the knowledge I’ve built up enough security to have some time off and that there’ll be something else around the corner soon enough.

I’m not entirely sure what the point if this post was really. I think it’s just my way of saying…

ever expanding family + graphic design freelancing career = very good.

I’ve had the google toolbar installed for a while now. It’s a very useful add-on to FireFox for me as I use google Notebook and Bookmarks and the toolbar provides nice easy access to both, so it’s a winner.

As a little bonus for me it has the ability to show the PageRank of whatever page you’re looking at. PageRank is the importance google assigns to a web page (0/10 been the lowest PR, 10/10 being the highest) based on how many other
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sites link to or reference that page. It gets a lot more complex than that and you can read about it and look at a horrible-and-not-very-helpful diagram here.

Anyway, I noticed the PageRank of the home page of this site, tmrw.co.uk, has gone up from 2/10 to 3/10. I know, not that significant at all, but it shows that I’m doing something right with all the little SEO bits and pieces I’m trying. As far as I can tell the better your PageRank the better your chances are of turning up on the front page of the google search results.

I put it down mainly to the fact that I’ve started leaving comments on other peoples blog posts.
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In the past I just read something then skipped onto something else, but now if I read something useful or interesting or download something off someones site, I usually leave a comment which in turn leaves a little hyperlink back to my site.

It looks like this site needs all the PR it can get at the moment too. I don’t know what I did or exactly when it happened, but despite my little PageRank boost Google doesn’t seem to like me any more.

It used to be that you searched for Freelance Design Leeds or Freelance Web Design Leeds and I came up on the first page for each one – not at the top by any means but I did OK.
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Now (Jan 2009) I’m currently back on page 10! Not good for generating new business, and the one thing a freelancer like me really needs to do is generate new business.

Ah well. I put this HUGE drop down the results table down to the fact I’ve been re-jigging the content and categorisation of this site/blog, and it’s confused google into thinking I’ve got a lot of duplicate content or something like that. I guess it’s just a case of waiting again and hoping I creep back up, page by page until I’m back up near the top again.

It’s not all bad though, have a search for freelance 3d design Leeds and I come second
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which is great. But to be honest, I don’t even know if that’s a term people search for a lot anyway.
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A little motion graphics piece I did for Swamp @ Brahm to illustrate the new features of a website they’d been putting a lot of hard work into.

The concept for the piece was by the creative guys and girls at Swamp, but they left it up to me to interpret their brief and this is how it turned out.

The whole thing was created layer by layer in After Effects, using the 3D layers and camera. Most of the mouse cursor movement etc is animated within AE, only a couple of bits are actual screen captures of the new site as it wasn’t live at the time we made this.

Hopefully, it will help other AS/Gaia novices get their head around a few things and give people a kick in the right direction.

View Demo

Here it is: http://www.tmrw.co.uk/demo/gaia-framework/

Source Files

Download it all here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/438049/gaia-as3-demo.zip

Dependencies

You’ll need the Gaia Flash Framework extension installed, you can download that from here.

Notes about the demo

1. This particular demo is built on Gaia v2.4.9 – the AS3 version
2. The site this demo is based on (designbygrain.com) was my very first AS3 site, I’m not a programmer and I’m not promising my code is as organised or tidy as is should be, but hopefully someone out there will find it useful!

Background

The first site I had the opportunity to use the Gaia Flash Framework on was designbygrain.com. The framework made it easy for me, an ActionScript novice, to create what I hope is a high quality section/page based site.

Not only was Gaia useful, but the community on the forums was ace at helping out and suggesting solutions to any problems I had, and Steven Sacks deserves a lot of credit for all his work in getting the Gaia Framework to the solid, helpful Adobe Flash extension it is today.

What is the Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash?

For those of you who don’t know what the Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash is, best just take a look at the website (www.gaiaflashframework.com), but in brief author of it, Steven Sacks, describes it as…

Gaia is an open-source front-end Flash Framework for AS3 and AS2 designed to dramatically reduce development time.

• Revolutionary scaffolding engine builds fully functional Flash sites in less than 10 minutes!
• Simple API for Navigation, Transitions, Preloading, Asset Management makes development a snap!
• Deep Linking achieved through seamless integration with SWFAddress
• SEO Scaffolding makes Search Engine Optimization as easy as pressing a button
• Easy enough for novices
• Powerful enough for experts

Ripe needed a strong 3D visual creating for a spread in a brochure for Media City – a close-up of a circuit board with the Media City logo incorporated onto it somehow.

Work In Progress Renders…

Because the job was only a quicky, the geometry needed to be kept pretty simple…

So most, if not all, of the actual detail on the PCB etc had to come from believable textures.

The original render looked like this…

…which was a little harsh and a bit too busy, but after a little post process colour grading and Lens-Blur/depth-of-field in PhotoShop, the final render looked fine for what Ripe needed.

I’ve completely made the theme my own and written the css from scratch – that was just quick hack to get things going, based on a free theme I’d found called Yelloh) and I’ve added some newer bits of work, with more to come.

Enjoy!

Anyway, last weekend I bought myself a new toy, a shiny new Kona Blast 08 mountain bike…

According to the reviews, an awesome bike for the price which I wholeheartedly intend to ride at breakneck speeds down long, steep mountains trails while jumping over streams and hopping over logs as big as cars, just like on Kickstart, but without the engines or necessary skill.

Due to a mix-up at Evans Cycles I ended up with a 19″ bike which was way too big for me so I had to wait a week to take it back and get a 17″ which is, I’m happy to report, a perfect fit. I picked the 17″ up this weekend and and went for my first bicycle ride in probably 15 years, and probably the first bit of real exercise I’ve done in all that time too. My legs (and back, arms, head and hands) ache but I know that one day, soon hopefully, I will feel the benefit.

The plan is to ride every evening and weekend and generally spend time having fun doing something other than looking at a monitor and moving a mouse around my desk.

So far, so good – except the weather, which seems to start raining each time I even think about going outside.

There were 3 main reasons for re-designing and moving this site over to WordPress…

• To make it easier to keep up-to-date
• Get a more permanent presence on the old internet and replace the temporary portfolio style site, which was just a quick-fix after Christmas
  
• And finally and most importantly, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation for anyone who’s not sure what that means) – To get the site indexed well by Google and bumped up the results pages, getting more and more work directly from people finding my site independently on the internet.

I’m a freelance graphic designer, so it’s all about getting work any way I can, and while doing work for design agency’s in and around Leeds is great, I’d ultimately like to get more work directly and establish my own client base, turning me and my little freelance operation into something larger.

The Task

Currently if I search for something like web design in Leeds, web design Leeds, or 3D visualisation Yorkshire, I’m not coming anywhere near the top of the list – and that’s a bad thing.

Typically a prospective client will search for something and go for the top few links, then maybe scan the first page of results to see if anything else catches their eye.

So, now that I have a decent up-datable site, the goal is to get my site ranked highly for search terms that I think people who need freelance design services like the ones I provide will actually type into Google.

How

From been a web designer for the last 7 years I (hopefully) know enough to make a start on getting my site ranked much higher than it currently is. The main things to concentrate on are…

• Work out what search terms you actually want to appear for at the top of the list.
• Relevant good content is key to it all – write good content to the subject you’d like to rank highly for and the visitors will, in time, start coming.
• So, if I want want my site to start ranking highly for terms like freelance web design Leeds or freelance photography Leeds then I need to actually use those phrases or variations on them (it’s almost as if this whole article is just part of my plan) on my site – although not excessively else you’ll get ranked down for trying to spam your way to the top of the list.
• Write good content in this blog section of my site so that people link to it (don’t worry, I’m not under any illusions this is good content just yet – I can design and take photos but I tend to waffle on a bit instead of getting to the point when writing – maybe I’ll write a novel one day, can’t be that hard can it?) and just generally try to get people linking to me site.  The more people Google sees linking to me, the higher the ‘authority’ it’ll give my site, and will therefore hopefully show my site above someone elses, who has for example exactly the same content but a lower authority according to their ranking system. This, and it’s a dark art in it’s self, is called Page Rank.
• Make sure the Titles of my pages contain some useful keywords and phrases (but not a list of keywords like the Meta tag – see below), but still remain descriptive and readable for the user.
• Meta keywords, as far as I can tell, are pretty much ignored by Google and a lot of other search engines these days. While it’s still good to have them the engines these days take a much closer look at the actual content of the pages to index them and, not the Meta tags. Instead of making sure you’ve got a nice list of Meta Keywords, make sure you use all the key-words and key-phrases you want to get indexed for in the content of your site instead, like 3D design in Leeds. See, easy. (sorry, couldn’t resist)
• Be patient, wait for the major search engines to get a good index of your site, and don’t be afraid to change content if the old stuff’s not working

I’ll be keeping this post updated with whatever genuinely useful information I find on this subject but for now I’m just going keep on updating my site, tweaking the keyword content here and there for each of the work pages etc, and keep an eye on my ranking. I’ll let you know if anything starts shifting.

That’s just because I’ve transferred the content from that really simple flat HTML portfolio site over into a WordPress based site, so I’ve got a nice simple CMS I can easily keep up-to-date – something I was struggling to find time to do with the old site.

So keep your eyes peeled and expect some design changes as I work get a real site design together – what you see now is just a reasonably tidy skeleton of a site so the search engines can work their magic.

That means you can easily use any font you want on a web page instead of having to settle for the classics like Arial or Tahoma etc.

FLIR, for example, is the thing that’s making all the headings for the articles on this site use Souvenir as their main font.

If you’ve used sIFR in the past you’ll know that it has it’s drawbacks – the main one for me was that I couldn’t get it work every time and in every instance I needed to. To be fair that was a while back and sIFR’s on version 3 now, but I like how simple FLIR has been to set up (it honestly took a few minutes) and I’ve not managed to break it or find an instance of it not working – so far anyway.

Take a look at the Facelift site here and have a play around with it, or jump straight in an take a look at some examples.

From what I can tell it doesn’t effect SEO and degrades nicely (i.e. just shows the page as it ordinarily would be without FLIR installed) for older browsers or for folks without JavaScript turned on etc.

There’s even a WordPress plugin to make it even easier for anyone to use, but if you’ve got control of all the files on your own server etc it’s just as easy to upload it and set it all up manually anyway.

The Holman Group asked for this day and night 3D architectural visualization of some proposed chances to an office building down in Solihull.

The building was modelled entirely in 3D Studio Max and rendered using the lovely V-Ray, with a good helping of Photoshop splashed on top to make it look really pretty.

All the design work was done by them so I can’t take any credit for that. The person they originally asked to do the Flash build had to drop out so that left them coming to me with a relatively short time-scale and budget asking for their new design to be built up.

Only a week or two before I’d come across the Gaia Flash Framework and thought this would be a good project to learn some basic AS3 on and get my head around it.

I was responsible for the majority of the Flash build which I did in AS2. If I’d have known about it at the time I’d have used Gaia to help with the build, but this project was just before I found out about the joy of Flash frameworks.

In the end the build was done entirely from scratch, utilising SWFAddress for the deep-linking.

I also did all the 3D backgrounds and logo animations etc, plus a lot of the work comping of the actors into those scenes.

It was modelled entirely in 3D Studio Max and rendered with VRay. Time-scales on his one were – as usual – pretty tight so I had to rush a lot of it, but it was a nice open brief and they just let me run with it with only a few tweaks at the end to correct the positioning of a few things to fit their page designs.

I think the text works quite well, if anyone out there is interested in knowing how to get smokey text like that let me know and I’ll put up a quick tutorial on how I did it.

I don’t buy anything without doing a lot of research and I ended getting myself a top spec 2.2 GHz 17″ Dell Vostro 1700, which as far as specs go is the same (less 0.2 GHz, which I can live without) as 17″ MacBook Pro. Yep, it’s not as pretty and it’s heavier but it’s literally less than half the price (£740 for the Dell vs £1860 for the Apple).

There’s a few minor differences in the number of USB ports and Firewire ports etc, 2.2 GHz vs 2.4 GHz, and the Vostro 1700 NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card uses slightly slower DDR2 memory and not DDR3 like the MacBook Pro, but all things considered it’s just about the same (at least on paper – I wish I had 17″ MacBook Pro to do a side by side comparison with but alas, I don’t)

The Vostro 1700 is more than powerful enough to runs all the creative apps I need it to without a problem, renders heavy 3D scenes quickly (faster than my year old Desktop PC), and importantly to me has a nice big hi-res screen. It’s not up to the standards of a good quality Desktop LCD monitor, but it’s plenty good enough for me. The one I got has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 (WUXGA) which costs extra but is worth it for the extra screen-res you get to play with, and one of the main reasons I got this model. It’s a shiny/reflective screen which some people won’t like, but I don’t mind, and it’s a bright crisp screen to work with.

If you don’t need a 17″ laptop but still want a powerful graphics machine take a look at the Dell Vostro 1500 – smaller, cheaper and lighter but just as powerful, you just loose some screen resolution.

I could have got it off dell.co.uk for around £1000 I think if I’d configured it right, but if you look on Dell’s Outlet store you can probably find the same pc/laptop that you were just about to get but save a few £100 off the main site’s price.

I ended up getting mine new off eBay, for £740 including delivery, which for the spec of the machine is amazing.

I’ve been using it for nearly 2 months now and I can’t really fault it either as a dedicated graphic design machine or as an entertainment laptop.

As with all technology though it’ll be out of date within a year and I’ll be looking for something bigger and better – but with the £1120 pounds I saved by not getting a MacBook Pro of near enough the same spec, I can quite happily justify the upgrade. Or go on holiday for a month. Or buy a second car.

Some Dell Vostro 1700 reviews I found – if you still need convincing…

• http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3937
• http://www.notebookforums.com/thread209058.html
• http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=161077

It turns out it was quite easy to implement and the client seems happy with it. There’s a quite a few WordPress plug-ins used, but that’s a good thing for me as I’m in no way a developer. There wasn’t really anything I needed it to do that couldn’t be worked out some how.

Like I said I’ll go into more detail later but as a quick review I ended up using…

• All in One SEO Pack – easy implementation of lots of nice SEO features
• Breadcrumb Navigation XT – customisable breadcrumb
  
• cforms II – really easy contact form integration
• Dashboard Lite – gets rid of a lot of the guff off the Dashboard that the client doesn’t care about
  
• Google XML Sitemaps – supposedly helps in getting the site indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN
  
• My Page Order – allows the client to order the new pages as they see fit
• Post Image – lets them show a custom header image for each page/post if they want
• Role Manager – stops them messing around with things they don’t need to know about
  
• Search Everything – searches everything
  
• Upload+ – renames anything they upload to remove unfriendly characters etc

Making the actual XHTML templates (or in WordPress terms the Theme) was nice and easy too.

All in all I’d highly recommend using WP as an easy solution to making a quick CMS site. MUCH easier to understand and implement than say a Joomla or Drupal site (at least for non-developer types like me), and for small sites it’s just as powerful.

I found out about CMS Made Simple the other day, after I’d started building this project in WP, and that looks quite promising too, but it’ll need to be really simple to get used instead of WP when I next have to build a CMS for someone.

UPDATE: Sorry folks, I’m all out of invites. Try do what I did and send a nice email to the admin at FFFFOUND! asking for an invite – chances are they’ll send you one themselves!

The idea is really simple, it’s an image bookmarking site. You find an image on the Internet that you like – be it an illustration, an amazing photo, some inspiration for something you’re working on or just a piece of art – then you click on a link in your browsers favourites (that you add via the ffffound.com website) called ‘POST TO FFFFOUND! and said image is sent to your FFFFOUND! account, so you can keep them all in one handy place. Mine are here for example.

That’s not all though. They look and see what images you’ve added to your account, see what other users like the same images as you, then recommend other images to you based on the other users similar tastes.

At the moment it’s in a Beta testing stage, so you can’t sign up without an invite. After looking unsuccessfully on Google for one I just emailed them and asked for one. They sent one back the next day.

If you can get your hands on an invite it’s worth checking out and trying it for yourself. It’ll waste a good few hours of your time just browsing the growing collection of nice looking stuff.

You can’t really see much from that one image, but click here for pretty amazing video of it in action – http://www.pablovalbuena.com/augmsculpt_condeduque_web.mov

No, I couldn’t work it out at first either. More about it at http://www.pablovalbuena.com/

I got enough spare time to play with the amazing 3DSMax character rig that Brad Noble has created and made freely(!) available on his website. OK, so it’s not the best animation you’ll ever see, but it’s just a bit of fun and I’ll hopefully re-work it over time. And yeah, I know he sort of hangs in the air a bit too long at the end, just ignore that…